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Monday, March 17, 2008

Querying the File System - From ColdFusion to SQL Server

While looking for a solution of a different problem, I realized that SQL Server has a feature called extended stored procedures. Extended stored procedures, at least in SQL Server 2000, have to be written in C++ and compiled to a DLL. A good example of such a procedure is my previous article on Using Regular Expression in SQL Server. I am not going to get into how to write extended stored procedures in this article since my C++ skills are rusty at best. Instead, I will talk about using an existing stored procedure to query the file system and how to move from using ColdFusion to using SQL Server.

Using ColdFusion

Getting a list of files is pretty trivial in ColdFusion. All you have to do is use the "<cfdirectory>" tag like so: